USGS Director Champions Domestic Mining

 

 

 

December 4, 2025 - The United States hosts some of the richest mineral potential on Earth, yet it depends on foreign suppliers – often China and Russia – for more than half of its supply of at least 46 of the 60 elements on the U.S. Geological Survey's newly finalized 2025 critical minerals list.

USGS Director Ned Mamula, who has written two books on America's mineral vulnerabilities, warns that this imbalance comes at a time when the global economy is more reliant than ever on mined commodities essential to energy, transportation, defense, and everyday living.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It is time for Americans, not Chinese or Russians, to be masters of our technology future. We have all the minerals we need beneath our feet," Mamula and co-author Ann Bridges wrote in the 2018 book "Groundbreaking! – America's new quest for mineral independence."

Their 2025 follow-up, "Undermining Power – How to overthrow mineral, energy, economic & national security disinformation," underscores the scale of the challenge. According to the authors, 100% of America's more than $26 trillion economy depends on critical minerals –whether in the smart appliances Americans use at home, drones and precision navigation tools on U.S. farmland, or the modern telecommunications and computing systems that power Wall Street and Washington.

"If we do not secure our mineral supplies, we risk an epic economic meltdown," Mamula and Bridges wrote.

Confirmed as USGS director on Oct. 7, Mamula now leads the federal scientific effort to map, characterize, and quantify the nation's mineral wealth as the United States pushes to strengthen supply chains essential to energy, technology, national security, and everyday living.

A more holistic critical minerals understanding

Shortly after Mamula's confirmation, the USGS unveiled a final 2025 critical minerals list – expanded from the 50 on the 2022 list and six more than were on the draft list proposed in August.

The final 2025 U.S. critical minerals list retains all 50 minerals from 2022 and adds 10 new entries: boron, copper, lead, metallurgical coal, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, silver, and uranium.

This broader list reflects a deeper, more sophisticated USGS risk assessment that modeled more than 1,200 trade-disruption scenarios across 84 mineral commodities to evaluate how supply interruptions would affect U.S. gross domestic product across key industries.

"Minerals-based industries contributed over $4 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2024," said Sarah Ryker, who served as acting director prior to Mamula's confirmation and currently serves as associate director of geology, energy, and metals at USGS. "With this methodology we can pinpoint which industries may feel the greatest impacts of supply disruptions and understand where strategic domestic investments or international trade relationships may help mitigate risk to individual supply chains."

This modeling initially identified 54 commodities for the draft list. Following its publication, several agencies and members of industry offered recommendations based on national security and resource priorities:

• Department of War urged reinstating arsenic and tellurium, both included on earlier lists.

• Department of Agriculture advocated adding phosphate.

• Department of Energy recommended metallurgical coal and uranium.

• Industry feedback supported adding boron, based on a single point of failure for specialized boron-based materials critical to the automotive, defense, energy, and tech sectors.

The updated critical minerals list, which reflects a more holistic understanding of how minerals underpin America's economy and security, serves as a compass for Washington policymakers.

Mamula's books highlight several mineral policy gaps he believes Congress must address.

Some of the top issues are:

• A notoriously long process to permit mines in the U.S.

• Frivolous lawsuits timed to delay mine development post-permitting.

• The absence of a Bureau of Mines, which was abolished in 1996.

"Today, the U.S. is the only G20 country without a Bureau of Mines," Mamula said during a September presentation to his alma mater at Penn State.

Many of the mining policy issues Mamula points out in his books are being addressed by Congress and the White House administration he now serves.

 

The need for mine permitting speed

Bringing online domestic mines in a timeframe that can help break American dependence on critical mineral imports will require the streamlining of a mine permitting process that is often measured in decades.

An S&P Global study found that it takes 29 years – second only to Zambia's 34 years – for a mine to progress from discovery to production in the United States.

The nearly three-decade mine development timetable does not align well with the energy and technological ambitions in the U.S., which are driving enormous demand for the minerals critical to building the envisioned AI data centers, along with an expanded and cleaner energy grid to power them.

The data centers themselves are pushing up the demand for more than 20 critical minerals, including copper, gallium, germanium, indium, platinum group metals, rare earths, silver, and tin.

At the same time, U.S. data centers are expected to consume up to 606 terawatt-hours of electricity by 2030 – nearly twice the current electricity use of the United Kingdom. Building the generation and transmission capacity to power this surge requires enormous quantities of copper, aluminum, nickel, graphite, cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and other mined materials.

"Critical mineral deficits, especially ones caused by foreign import trade restrictions or embargoes, is also a very tangible threat to the integrity of the nation's electrical grid, potentially compromising energy generation, transmission, distribution, and the supply chains beyond," Mamula wrote in an October report for Unleash Prosperity.

As the U.S. vies to maintain its technological lead into the age of AI, the nation's need for critical minerals is rising sharply, and global competition for these essential technology elements is intensifying.

Leveraging FAST-41 to streamline permitting

The Trump administration is leaning on the federal FAST-41 program to accelerate the permitting of domestic mines that can help deliver the minerals and metals critical to America's AI and energy infrastructure.

Established in 2015 by Title 41 of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act, FAST-41 is a process led by Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council) to improve the transparency and predictability of permitting critical infrastructure projects in the U.S.

In response to directives in the "Immediate measures to increase American mineral production" executive order signed by President Trump in March, the Permitting Council has added 49 critical mineral and mining projects to the FAST-41 program.

"Prior to the Trump administration, the average time it took to permit a mining project was 29 years," said Permitting Council Executive Director Emily Domenech. "That kind of endless bureaucracy doesn't protect the environment, and it won't help us develop critical resources to power our economy and compete with China."

FAST-41 substantially reduces large project permitting timelines by coordinating all federal agencies involved in a mine's approval, establishing enforceable timetables, running processes in parallel where appropriate, and eliminating duplicative reviews. Agencies and project developers are held accountable for meeting deadlines.

A clear example is Graphite One's Graphite Creek Mine project in Alaska, which is slated to receive the federal permits needed to develop and operate the 175,000-metric-ton-per-year graphite mine by the end of September 2026, less than 16 months after the project was accepted into the FAST-41 program.

"Under President Trump's leadership, the Permitting Council is committed to streamlining the federal process, providing transparency to project developers, and ensuring that responsible environmental reviews are as efficient as possible," said Domenech. "We are excited to continue to grow the FAST-41 critical mineral and mining portfolio and shepherd more projects through federal permitting."

Eliminating mine litigation abuse

While gaining the permits needed to build and operate a mine in the U.S. is famously long and cumbersome, the process itself is only one facet of a larger barrier – the second facet is the nearly inevitable legal challenges that come after permits are issued.

These lawsuits, often lodged or backed by environmental conservation groups, are so pervasive that they have become considered by companies that want to develop a mine in the U.S. as an extension of the permitting process.

While many of these lawsuits have minimal legal standing – federal permitting agencies win about 80% of lawsuits challenging permits issued under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – these lawsuits delay projects by an average of around four years as the court proceedings play out.

These lawsuits are often not filed until the project proponent is nearly ready to begin development, maximizing the length of delay and financial damage to the mine developer.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle view the tactic as abusive.

The bipartisan "Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act", introduced by House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), seeks to modernize NEPA and reduce delays caused by last-minute lawsuits.

"Being a good steward of our environment doesn't mean we must tolerate a years-long permitting process that is onerous, overly complex and ripe for litigation abuse," said Golden. "A country as advanced as the United States must be nimble enough to build what we need, when we need it."

To help make America's permitting process more nimble, the SPEED Act would establish a 150-day deadline for filing challenges to federal permitting decisions under NEPA – the most litigated statute in the U.S.

The permitting legislation is co-sponsored by 14 members of the House – seven Democrats and seven Republicans.

Stepping stones to a stronger economy

As a geologist who has worked with leading scientific and intelligence agencies on minerals and energy research, including the U.S. Department of Energy and Central Intelligence Agency, Mamula emphasizes that America is blessed with some of the richest mineral wealth anywhere in the world.

In 2017, the National Mining Association estimated that the U.S. hosts at least $6.2 trillion worth of minerals in reserves. Mamula believes that the number is much higher – likely closer to $12 trillion when you factor in rising metals prices and improved mining technologies.

Above and beyond the national security benefits that come with being less reliant on China, Russia, and others for its critical minerals, Mamula points to the economic gains that would be made by extracting more of the reserves buried beneath American soil.